# Middle Age (Christopher Hamilton)
* It is simply a matter of chance that we are born to the parents we have, into a given family, community, socioeconomic group or class, speaking a particular mother tongue, with a certain history and cultural inheritance. It is also a matter of luck that we are born male or female, good-looking or otherwise, physically strong or weak, and with certain (latent) talents, abilities, aptitudes and so on. (p. 3)
* When others in middle age become increasingly aware of their mortality as their body starts to age in a way that cannot be ignored, there is felt the cold presence of death. (p. 9)
* It is, in fact, probably in an increased sense of death, of one’s own mortality, that one first grasps the significance of middle age. This has a corporeal side, but it is also connected with the idea that time is running out. (p. 9)
* Part of physical ageing is that the world becomes increasingly abstract or weightless, both in terms of its material presence and in terms of one’s projects, goals and ambitions, that is, that the consciousness of the body begins to eclipse the consciousnesses of the world. (p. 11)
* Most of us are likely to find out that we are not what we wanted to be or imagined we were. (p. 13)
* Coming to terms with who one is involves struggling with recalcitrant and stubborn traits of character. (p. 14)
* Only when I reached middle age did I realize that this possibility, which had become a reality, means that I have missed or squandered other opportunities. (p. 14)
* I have started to say
“A quarter of a century”
Or “thirty years back”
About my own life.
It makes me breathless.
It’s like falling and recovering
In huge gesturing loops
Through an empty sky. (p. 15)
* Such loneliness is, I think, characteristic of the experience of mid-life, for that is the time when one is likely to become newly aware of just how hostile the world can be. (p. 21)
* One sees that goodness and kindness are rarely rewarded and are often punished; that mediocrity and thoughtlessness are often more successful than genuine insight and imagination; that wealth and other material goods are usually extraordinarily unjustly distributed; that arrogance and conceit are often the requirements for success and prestige; and that goodness is usually largely held in place not by genuine virtue but by fear and anxiety. (p. 21)
* Middle age is a kind of psychological and conceptual blank, by which I mean not that there is not much said on it, but that what is said on it is said in the face of the natural tendency of middle age to resist articulation and clarification: it does not naturally offer itself for our investigation. (p. 24)
* One aspect of the experience to which Bate is drawing attention is the sense typical in middle age of being trapped in the life one is living. Central here is undoubtedly one’s work. (p. 26)
* Central to the way in which work contributes to the sense of being trapped in mid-life is that almost all modern forms of work are deeply bureaucratic. (p. 26)
* This is the reverse side of its being so deeply bureaucratized: just as such work exists largely for its own sake, losing sight of any purpose or reason it might have outside itself, so it predominantly exists for the maintenance of the individual as a creature that needs food, shelter and warmth simply to go on existing – that is, without purpose or reason beyond the satisfaction of those needs. (p. 27)
* This is the reverse side of its being so deeply bureaucratized: just as such work exists largely for its own sake, losing sight of any purpose or reason it might have outside itself, so it predominantly exists for the maintenance of the individual as a creature that needs food, shelter and warmth simply to go on existing – that is, without purpose or reason beyond the satisfaction of those needs. Unsurprisingly, much of working life tends to become a kind of exhausting, deadening effort. (p. 27)
* If in middle age you have the sense that your life has taken on the form of “an infinitely interwoven surface” you will probably also crave the order of a narrative thread as a refuge from the chaos. (p. 28)
* If there is any wisdom to be gained from the experience of middle age it lies in accepting that reflection is likely to make everything less straightforward and more intractable. (p. 29)
* One issue here is that of giving up many of the great plans one had earlier in life, which one can now see are forms of naïveté or vanity that distort and deform one’s appreciation of the present moment. Giving up such plans can seem – and is – to some extent a loss, a capitulation to exigencies of life that one cannot have chosen, but it is also a form of release, a recognition that what really matters is the quality of one’s inner life, which has in many ways little to do with external or socially sanctioned achievements. (p. 30)
* One chief art in life is, then, I think, the capacity to take pleasure in the small things of life, even as these things cross our path unexpectedly. (p. 30)
* My sense of loneliness was – and remains – partly a sense of not properly belonging to either of the families between which I stand and to which I am related. (p. 31)
* The world, so it seems in this mood, is populated by a large but finite number of lives and one might have been leading any one of them – so how come I ended up leading that one? (p. 32)
* Just as one has to learn to cope with one’s own character, so one has to learn to cope with others’ characters. This is not to deny, of course, that one can affect others by being around them a fair bit, but it does mean, first, that it is pointless trying directly to change someone else and, secondly, that any effect one has on another is like the effect a gardener might have on a tree: it can grow in this or that direction under his influence, but all the basics of what it is are fixed and something over which he has no control. (p. 36)
* What is needed is to try to structure the external details of life so that they nurture and bring out what is good and positive in us. (p. 37)
* They fuck you up, your mum and dad. (p. 41)
* One way or another we all have to forgive our parents: for what they are and what they did. (p. 42)
* Middle age, just because it lies at the mid-point of life, is, I think, the point in life that most invites comprehension as a strange combination of the transient and eternal, the fleeting and the permanent. (p. 49)
* Middle age is the quintessential period in life to suffer from nostalgia, a seductive but unhealthy emotion. It is very common at this time of life to regret the loss of the past. (p. 49)
* It is unclear why even a past that was painful can become the object of nostalgic longings. It may be that, once pain and suffering are over, it is impossible properly to occupy again the feelings one then had, and so the past loses (some of) its awfulness (p. 51)
* Far from its being the case that human memory is a reliable recorder of past events, it is more like a kind of mechanism for the generation of fantasies that latch on to events from the past, not merely colouring them in the process, but changing them. (p. 53)
* Middle age is the time of life in which one sees how important it is to be able to forget a great deal in order to live healthily. (p. 53)
* The point is not that one should not remember, but that one needs to know when to remember and when to forget; one needs a balance, which will always be precarious, between the two. (p. 54)
* Middle age is the point at which the compression begins, and one feels that the present and future are being squeezed by the pressure from behind of the past. (p. 57)
* One disquieting aspect of this sense of loss of the past and longing for it is a feeling of boredom with the present. (p. 60)
* Somehow or other I could not rid myself of the thought that everything I did was something I was doing simply in order to kill time, and that this was true for others, even if they did not know it. (p. 61)
* I am now more than ever inclined to see something egotistical in faith, a kind of self-concern in which one is assured of one’s own importance. (p. 63)
* These are the kinds of thought that mean nothing to a young person: it seems to make no sense whatever from a young person’s perspective to think that getting what one wants is just the kind of thing that can make one unhappy. They are the fruit of the experience of life, and there is simply no way that they can be learnt or properly understood except through one’s own experience. (p. 65)
* But it is also the old wisdom that one cannot sensibly aim for happiness; the best way to be happy is, largely anyway, to forget about happiness and get on with other things. (p. 65)
* These voices compete in us, and most of us spend a great deal of our lives trying to elevate one of them to the supreme voice, a voice that will drown out all the others, subdue them, remove them, so that we can become whole and complete. (p. 71)
* We all of us carry around with us obsessions, anxieties, fears, neuroses, compulsions and inhibitions. (p. 72)
* The human mind is fragmented, conflict-ridden, messy, recalcitrant and awkward. We find it hard to remember that others are like this, partly because we wish to conceal this from others because we are so ashamed of our being like this, and partly because our own inner states are so well known to us, and clearly so weird, that we imagine no one else could really be like this. (p. 72)
* That is my basic view of friendship: a kind of relationship in which one allows the other as much as possible to be just as he is without requiring him to be otherwise. (p. 73)
* Simon Critchley has suggested in his book On Humour that, in the face of the desire for plenitude, we have to be able to laugh at ourselves, to find ourselves ridiculous: laughter and smiling – at oneself – are forms of anti-depressant. (p. 88)
* Montaigne was confronting the problem of how to be stoical about the fact that we will simply never get all we want or need because we are possessed of a limitless desire for plenitude, and yet at the same time not allow that to render us melancholy and enervated. Montaigne was able to accept his melancholy for what it was and yet find a way past it through his humour. In a way, what we need to recover in middle age in order to deal with it is a certain capacity to play. (p. 91)
* At any rate, while I do not at all wish to over-romanticize how difficult it is to bring up children, I can see that there is a kind of nobility in doing so. In a way, it is part of (entering) what James Joyce, in his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, called “the fair courts of life”. Moreover, I see it as an expression of optimism: I think one reason people have children is that, having grasped the compromised nature of life, the desire to start a family is an expression of hope in better things. And beyond that there is something simply extraordinary in someone’s being born at all, wondrous in the fact that, as Arendt put it, human parents summon their children into life from the darkness. (p. 99)
* It is this, I am sure, that partly makes love of a child possible for parents, as my friend suggested to me: the very lack of the child’s self-consciousness, his or her wholly innocent and complete existence as nothing more than a body, is central in this love. (p. 101)
* No human being, he suggests, is free from the desire to cease being human. (p. 104)
* Middle age is, among other things, an intense negotiation between one’s longing for a life complete and lacking in nothing, and the recognition that such a life would, after all, be unbearable. (p. 106)
* It is, he reminded me, extraordinarily difficult to remain silent while another talks, but this is the very job of the analyst. And in keeping silent, the analyst allows the client to repeat his own story in such a way that the narrative he offers becomes boring to himself, and he starts to emerge into a different, it is to be hoped more constructive, narrative of his life. (p. 111)
* All lives contain suffering in one form or another; that is just the human condition. (p. 115)